ABSTRACT
Tourism continues to grow, with international arrivals now over one billion annually. Cities, towns, rural and peripheral communities all experience tourism to a greater or lesser extent. The tourism economy is important to many communities but remains a contested realm. To better plan for tourism development a more holistic, inclusive understanding of stakeholder agency and stakeholder dissonance is required even if this leads us to ‘the end of tourism’. The burgeoning tourism opportunities of recent decades have led to tourism becoming a near ubiquitous element of regional development discourse in a great many places. However, there is limited integrated conceptualisation of this in tourism economic studies while case studies of successful dissonance abound. Feminist economic geographies could open this space and therefore lead to new avenues of research of what ‘had until now been relatively “invisible” because the concepts and discourses that could make them ‘visible’ have themselves been marginalised and suppressed’.
